The mind wanderings of a retired London Underground Engineer enjoying life above ground.

Thursday, 2 September 2010

Reservoir Dogs !

So a brilliant idea!

Lets take the cameras and the bat detector to Wilstone reservoir at sunset and watch all the birds collecting for the night, enjoy the evening noises, watch the sunset and listen to the bats as they come out to hunt.

Umm! The field adjacent to the car park was being harvested. Have you ever noticed how noisy farm equipment is? The distances were just so vast that even with binoculars and video zoom we could hardly make any details of the birds out. We walked off round to the viewing hide and met a constant steam of joggers, joggers with dogs and walkers with dogs, all coming towards us and the car park. There may even have been a few dogs out on their own.

The hide is a long way into the wooded bank and obviously it gets darker in the woods earlier but by the time we got to the hide we had to use the video camera light to read the notice on the hide warning of the 2 wasps nest inside.

The wasps were asleep and did not bother us but by the time we worked out how to open the viewing hatches it was pretty dark and the main viewing experience was of the pretty orange lights on all the farm vehicles. The one picture I took that came out shows the orange vehicle hazard light clearly reflected in the reservoir. On the little island are Coots and Lapwings....they are mainly black so show up in silhouette on the grey stone beach .... but not well on the water.

We gave up and made our way back through the dark.

Not a single Bat heard through the detector.

First time out in the Nissan in the dark. The dashboard lights are very pretty and the automatic headlight turning on computer thingy works.